The natural world. Looking pretty for 3.5b years.

Changing Climate...Lake Powell "re-imagined"

"Lake Powell is a reservoir on the Colorado River straddling the border between Utah and Arizona. It is named for John Wesley Powell, the explorer and one-armed Civil War veteran who floated the river using three wooden boats in 1869. It is the second largest man-made reservoir by water capacity in the United States storing 24,322,000 acre feet of water when full. Lake Powell was created by the flooding of Glen Canyon by Glen Canyon Dam finished in 1966. It is a major vacation spot with around 2 million people visiting every year."

Lake Powell, Utah at Full Capacity (credit: Wiki-commons)

The Secretary of Interior, Sally Jewell recently commented to a gathering of outdoor manufacturers that: "climate change is the 'new normal' on the Colorado River ecosystem."

She was reflecting on the environmental changes underway throughout the Colorado River system from the headwaters to the Gulf of California. A photograph of the dried-up and abandoned Hite Marina provides a visual impression of the diminished river snaking across the once full reservoir.